I was a teenager once. And I was a teenager at the time that this movie was made in a public high school in Levittown Long Island New York with several thousand other teenagers. I had plenty of anxiety. Things I didn't understand, like girls and what they meant when they talked with me and how much desire I had to talk with them. things were so often confusing. In my mind, I didn't look right. I didn't feel right. I often acted moody. I sometimes blamed things on my mother that certainly weren't her fault.

And then, when I was about 17 years old or so, that when away. I later learned that I was a teenage boy still growing my prefrontal cortex -that part of my brain that would allow me to see the results of my actions.

Being a teenage boy wasn't easy and I hear from my wife and others that being a teenage girl wasn't easy either. Nothing has changed in that regard.

I saw this film in my classroom when I was 15 years old. It didn't help. It was designed to help and I am not criticizing the efforts of the filmmakers and the educators who I believe were doing the best that they could. But "perfect" teenage families like the one shown here wasn't the case for almost everyone I knew. There was far more stress at home than was shown in this film.

It's a very 1950s look at teen problems. I haven't seen recent videos that are made for educational use to be shown in the classroom. I imagine most teenagers these days learn just about everything from YouTube. Do you think that this clip would help if run in classrooms today?

I have very few subscribers who are teenagers, less than 1% of my subscriber audience. But if you are a teenager, does this film even though it is quite old, help you to understand yourself?

If you are a parent of a teenage boy, an experience I'm quite familiar with, please remember that many boys are unable to talk about what is on their minds and what is bothering them and how insecure they may feel about themselves. It isn't that they are blocking these feelings from you. They are blocking them largely from themselves, and mothers so frequently want to raise questions that seem quite reasonable to them but are nearly impossible to answer when you are pressured with the kinds of anxieties so many teenage boys and I assume girls, feel.

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David Hoffman